What's my carbon footprint for a 500km drive from Malacca to Penang?

I was curious to figure out what is the carbon footprint of my car and a 500km journey.
A bit of googling, I figure out from US EPA that 1 US gallon of gasoline produces about 8.788 kg of CO₂ or 2.321544 kg of CO₂ per litre.
My car's mileage is about 0.065 litres/km or 15.4 km/litre.
So, for a 500km journey from Melaka to Penang should consume about:
500 km x 0.065 l/km = 32.5 litres of petrol.

So, the CO₂ released for burning 32.5 litres of petrol:
32.5 litres x 2.3215 kg/l = 75.45 kg of CO₂

Finally for my journey from Penang - Malacca - Penang: 2 x 75.45 = 150.90 kg of CO₂ for this weekend holiday trip.
Bad bad boy...
Anyway, Happy Diwali to my Indian... :-)

Counterfeit Corsair High Performance XMS RAM

Ok, make a guess. Which of the two following DIMMs are fake.



Now, recently, I bought a Corsair Ultra Performance XMS 512MB DDR400 RAM from lelong.com.my (a local ebay clone) because I already have an existing Corsair RAM and getting another one should give my aging machine a performance boost with more memory and faster dual channel memory bandwidth.

I was pretty excited when I receive the parcel a few days ago. I plugged it into the mainboard and it seems to work. It passes the memtest86+. However, I notice something fishy when the memory speed shows 333MHz when it should be 400MHz.

I booted into the old rusty WinXP (linux lshw does seems to show much useful info), and I ran PC Wizard. The following is part of the report from PC Wizard.

>> Information EEPROM (DIMM1)
 Manufacturer : Unspecified
 Part Number : CMX512-3200C2
>> Serial Number
 Type : DDR-SDRAM PC3200 (200 MHz)
 Size : 512 Mb (2 rows, 4 banks)
 Module Buffered : No
 Module Registered : No
 Width : 64 bits
 Error Correction Capability : No
 Max. Burst Length : 8
 Refresh : Reduced (.5x)7.8 µs, Self Refresh
 Voltage : SSTL 2.5v
 Supported Frequencies : 166 MHz, 200 MHz
 CAS Latency (tCL) : 2 clocks @166 MHz, 2.5 clocks @200 MHz
 RAS to CAS (tRCD) : 3 clocks @166 MHz, 3 clocks @200 MHz
 RAS Precharge (tRP) : 3 clocks @166 MHz, 3 clocks @200 MHz
 Cycle Time (tRAS) : 7 clocks @166 MHz, 8 clocks @200 MHz
>> Information EEPROM (DIMM3)
 Manufacturer : Kingston
 Part Number : K
 Serial Number : 8908BA99
 Type : DDR-SDRAM PC2700 (166 MHz)
 Size : 512 Mb (2 rows, 4 banks)
 Module Buffered : No
 Module Registered : No
 Width : 64 bits
Error Correction Capability : No
Max. Burst Length : 8
Refresh : Reduced (.5x)7.8 µs, Self Refresh
Voltage : SSTL 2.5v
Supported Frequencies : 133 MHz, 166 MHz
CAS Latency (tCL) : 2 clocks @133 MHz, 2.5 clocks @166 MHz
RAS to CAS (tRCD) : 3 clocks @133 MHz, 3 clocks @166 MHz
RAS Precharge (tRP) : 3 clocks @133 MHz, 3 clocks @166 MHz
Cycle Time (tRAS) : 6 clocks @133 MHz, 7 clocks @166 MHz

As you can see at DIMM 1, the CMX512-3200C2 is my existing black Corsair DIMM and the other at DIMM 3 is a Kingston DDR PC2700!! I was like WTF!!? I don't mean Kingston is bad (I never had problems with my mum's machine), but I was expecting a high performance type and what I got was a standard Kingston value type.

So with a little searching on the web, I found out that all Corsair memory modules should have a holographic sticker with its model number, speed and other details as shown below for my original 512MB stick.



The Kingston RAM with a Corsair heatspreader is as below.


I am still in the process of negotiation with the seller for a refund or exchange. It seems that he also does not realize that, I would be nice to believe that it is an honest mistake as he is still willing to negotiate.

The black Corsair module has been giving me solid performance and stability for the last 5 years. So next time, I'll be smarter to make sure to check for the holograhic sticker when you purchase Corsair DIMMs.

BTW, I also found a pretty good "webinar" on memory basics by Corsair. Even for people familiar with computer hardware, this should be a pretty good refresher. http://www.corsairmemory.com/memory_basics/index.html


UPDATE: The seller agreed to exchange for a pair of Kingston 2 x 512MB Hyper-X memory for a little extra money. I got the item and this time they are real.

KDE 4.1.1

Just installed updated to KDE 4.1.1 from Kubuntu Member's KDE4 PPA.
The server seems rather slow. It took me quite a few nights to download all the over 70 packages. I wonder if there are any Asian mirrors for the Launchpad PPA.
Anyway, here's my desktop screen capture.

Malaysian mirrors for Ubuntu

Just found out that Multimedia University (MMU) has a mirror of the Ubuntu repository and it has a 100Mbps connection and it seems pretty up-to-date.
So for Malaysian Ubuntu users, set your /etc/apt/source.list to
http://ubuntu.mmu.edu.my/ubuntu

for example, for hardy

deb http://ubuntu.mmu.edu.my/ubuntu/ hardy-updates universe main multiverse restricted
deb http://ubuntu.mmu.edu.my/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse

Even with my 384Kbps Streamyx line, I get pretty good 40KBps downloads. It would be interesting to see what is the speed for the next major update.

Wireless Laser Mouse

Just bought a Lexma wireless laser mouse for RM70 at the last PC Fair.
I was kinda pleasantly surprised by its precision and sensitivity. If you still remember the jump in precision and sensitivity between older roller ball mouse and current LED based optical mouse, there is also a similar jumps in precision and accuracy when switching to laser mouse.
It works on almost any surface, much better than standard optical mouse.
Well, it was mainly for my mum, she was complaining of shoulder pain because of playing too much casual games and the computer desk isn't exactly ergonomic.
So I thought that getting a wireless laser mouse would enable her to use the mouse in a more natural comfortable position like using the mouse on a pillow on the lap instead of stretching her hand to a less comfortable position on the desk.
Another interesting thing about laser mouse is that it seems to use infrared laser, so it is not visible unlike red LED optical sensors used in the common optical mouse.
Lastly, it works out-of-box with Kubuntu/Linux!

Nokia Acquiring Trolltech

The news that Nokia, the cellphone giant, is buying up Trolltech, the company behind Qt framework, which is also one of the core framework used in KDE has probably shaken the much of the open source community, particularly KDE.
While their current announcement seems to indicate that Nokia and Trolltech will continue to support open source and KDE, only time will tell if they remain true to this promise. For further info, see http://dot.kde.org/1201517986/

KDE 4.0 is now released!

Ladies and gentlemen,
The wait is over. KDE4 is now released. This is the release announcement, http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/

I am so eager to download a live CD to try is out!

Installing Kubuntu Gutsy

Ok I gotta admit that I must be the last Linux geek on earth to install Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10 when people are starting to talk about KDE4 RC2 and stuffs.

I have been rather busy recently and don't have much time do spend for upgrading the OS. Finally, a few weeks ago, I took some time to attempt to upgrade from Fiesty to Gutsy.
As usual, I always backup the OS partition in case anything wrong with the upgrade. After I imaged the partition with Clonezilla, I started Adept Manager and upgraded all my packages and then perform the Version Upgrade as suggested in the upgrade instruction in Kubuntu site. However, the version upgrade installed failed and after restarting, it fails to boot properly.

I thought of restoring the partition but later decided to perform a fresh install by download the Kubuntu Gutsy Live CD. After downloading and burning the CD, popped in the CD and launch the Live CD. Installation was smooth and seems faster that when I installed Edgy. This time, instead of choosing ext3 for the root partition, I decided to try reiserfs. From my previous experience with openSUSE and this new installation, I feel that it is slightly faster than ext3. Also, it does not require the mandatory checking during bootup after every 30 mounts which is a little annoying with ext3.

Overall, I have to say that I am quite satisfied with Gutsy. Many things has improved. The big one is that nVidia binary drivers can be installed with just a click upon first startup and the default configuration work well. No need to hack xorg.conf and manually installed the binary drivers. The multimedia keys on my Microsoft Natural Keyboard also works out-of-box with amarok. One of the first thing that I did was to reconfigure /etc/default/acpi-support to enable suspend to work properly as described in this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-596666.html
After that, I have also installed lm-sensors and ksensors to monitor the CPU temperature. This is all for now. I'll still need to spend some time to install the build-essentials and stuffs that I usually use whenever I have some free time.

Of self-googling and sorting algorithm

Okay, out of boredom and curiosity, I did a little self-googling and guess what I found?

http://www.yzu.ca/sdba/action/a9over1/sortingMain.swf

This is an assignment that my friends and I created for an Algorithm and Data Structure course 6 years ago when we were still doing our first year engineering.
This is nostalgic!

BTW, recently, Mark LaFamme has attributed this self-googling as masturbation! So hey, I would like to make it clear that I don't do this often. If I do, I would have discovered the above link much earlier.